We Need GSoC Mentors

It’s time to file our application. Now or never, folks! GSoC applications will be coming in during April, and the active coding/mentorship period would be from May 23 – August 22. To be accepted as a mentor:

You must be able to spend a couple of hours per week during the active coding period reviewing student work, answering questions, and general being a source of inspiration.

You must have enough patches that have been committed to core for it to be a no-brainer that of course everyone knows you’re going to be super-familiar with core codebase, coding standards, etc.

You must be willing to commit a few hours during the student application period (March 28 – April8) to review and rate all incoming student applications. You should plan to save a half day right at the end when we get the last-minute flood of applications.

You must be able to attend a couple of IRC chats for potential students to ask questions during the application period.

You must do two evaluations of your student, at midterm and at finals. These are largely multiple choice forms. In addition, we’ll want you to post a short progress report now and then (we’ll have a schedule).

In addition to primary mentors who fill all these requirements, we need backup mentors. No one ever has as much time as they’d like to spend with their students, so double- or triple-teaming on the guidance and check-ins will ensure that no student is inadvertently neglected.

We should be able to round up at least 10-15 more people, yeah? Please reply to this post if you’re interested, as we need to know how many people will be mentoring to know how many slots we should request. Will update list above as comments come in so there’s one master list.

We’ll put up an ideas page later today and you can also start dropping ideas onto it.

Looking at your wordpress.org profile, it looks like all your activity has been around your plugins. Have you contributed patches to core before? Most GSoC projects start as plugins but are intended ultimately for core, so it’s best if the primary mentors are well-versed in contributing to core. Do you think you have that experience, or would you be better suited as a backup mentor?

I have contributed 4 patches, 2 made it in to core (one to clean up the options in the DB and one to extend XML-RPC for post formats). I’ve also been active with reviewing others’ patches around XML-RPC and working with troubleshooting on the XML-RPC list. 9 times out of 10, I’ll put something on trac when I think of it, but can’t publish a patch until I get home … only to find either otto or scribu have patched it while I was on the road.

If you’ve got enough support without me, feel free to list me as a backup mentor. But I’d still like to be involved on some level.

If you don’t think it’s worth a GSOC project then you must be underestimating the scope of the architectural shift implied by the idea in that ticket. I haven’t seen enough code written by all those involved to move this forward as steadily as a well-run GSOC student would do.

I’ve got some personal stuff that’s going to limit the amount of time I have to devote this summer, but I’d like to play some sort of role. I could be a backup mentor, or a primary mentor if there’s a great project that really needs someone in a pinch. Anything BuddyPress.